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An anonymous reader writes "Most browser benchmarks are isolated, artificial tests that can be gamed by browser vendors optimizing those specific cases. With only those benchmarks to go on, the folks at LucidChart were skeptical that the IE9 beta would actually outperform other modern browsers in real-world applications. To separate hype from reality, they built their first browser benchmarking tool, based in LucidChart itself. This benchmark is to SunSpider what a Left4Dead 2 benchmark is to 3Dmark Vantage. Product specs don't matter, only real-world performance on a real-world application. The results were surprising. IE9 held its own pretty well (with a few caveats), and the latest Firefox 4 beta came in dead last."

Browser makers design for tests, real world data shows exact opposite results to what you expect. We've got a crew working on the story overnight and will have a full update for you on the weekend edition of Wicked Early News, we start before normal people wake up.

Actually, these results look very similar to the ones the WebKit guys (both chrome and safari teams) publish. They're almost always saying chrome and safari are similarly fast in the lead, firefox lags slightly, and IE8 is way slower... These are the same results as here. It just appears that IE9 is now added to the pile, and added at the top.

So what have we learned1) Mozilla are good at lying about benchmarks (actually, we already knew that, they've been claiming the next big firefox release would be faster than everything for a while now)2) IE9 is quick

The question is... is IE9 correct. I'll take works correctly but takes time over doin it rong quickly any day.

I'm not so quick to forget why I dropped IE in the first place. To get away from ActiveX and general apathetic browser security. Where's that represented in benchmark?

Well, that's more specifically why you dropped IE 5.5 and IE6. By the time you get to IE8, these aren't really issues and Firefox has traded its early security-consciousness for usability. And it looks from those charts that IE9 runs pretty fast. That lines up with my own experiences of the beta. Though it's worth keeping in mind that the IE9 is a beta so it's not 100% fair to draw conclusions until it goes to release.

The most interesting things in the article aren't in TFS, though. One is that javascript processing is now apparently so fast that it's dwarfed by the time it actually takes the browser to render an updated page. Another is that in order to get the results from Firefox that they did, they actually had to drop a number of anomalous results where it ran vastly more slowly for unknown reasons. I'm not surprised as Firefox has been getting fatter and fatter ever since 3. The third is that Chrome blows everything else out of the water. They used an old version of Opera which is a shame as I have the newer one and my anecdotal impression is that it's snappier than the previous one so it would have been worth using the latest Opera. But still, Chrome apparently renders far faster than both IE9 and FF. I'd love to know why. Is it just that it's a new project designed from scratch without the cruft that other browsers come with? Does it lack support for significant functionality? Has there been a lot of low-level optimization?

I think in a years time, the real battle is going to be between IE and Chrome. Even today I mainly only use FF for web-development due there being some excellent development add-ons for it that IE can't compete with. Opera is a nice general browser and my default, but its cookie management is shit. Much of FF's funding comes from Google, who I presume would want to push Chrome and who I guess fund Firefox as a means of keeping Microsoft from re-establishing browser-dominance. But that may not be sufficient reason to really push it to be the best it can be, just to keep it "good enough".

I don't wish to be disrespectful to the FF developers. I know how complicated a code-base that size is and they're to be commended on producing a browser that serves well. But it's become a big, unwieldy beast in comparison to the leanness of Chrome and the new IE.

The prevalence of firefox has helped the security of IE considerably, for a number of reasons...Before they started losing market share, MS had no intention of improving IE at all.. Also now that no browser has over 90% market share they become far less attractive targets for malware authors, who instead now either target specific areas (eg ie6 is still huge in corporate settings) or other software which has a huge market share (adobe flash/pdf, msoffice).So long as there are a handful of browsers out there competing with each other.Were it not for firefox, ie7 would be a slightly warmed over ie6, and would still be getting attacked on a daily basis and users would have nowhere to go.

Incidentally, those benchmarks show ie9 coming in 3rd from last, only firefox 4 beta (by a small margin) and ie8 (by a huge and laughable margin) are slower. Actually released browsers such as firefox 3.6, safari 5, chrome 6 and opera 10 are all ahead of both betas of ie9 and firefox 4.

Now as for why the firefox 4 beta is slower than 3.6, it could be compiled in a debug mode (as betas often are), its new javascript engine has only just been integrated and needs tweaking etc...

The fact that current beta versions of both ie9 and firefox 4 are way behind current non beta versions of other browsers is rather poor, and you would hope that both will be fixed by the time their final releases come around.

As for Google, they make their money from the web and generally don't care which browser you use to access it, so long as that browser is fast enough to deliver a reasonable experience and standard enough so it doesn't force them to spend a lot of time kludging around. Older versions of IE were a threat to google as they made their web based apps appear slow, new versions appear better however IE is still controlled by google's biggest competitor who, given the chance, would use it against google in any way they can. When it comes to firefox/opera/chrome/safari i doubt google really cares which you use.

And on this very site the exact article you linked to was dismissed [slashdot.org] as being pro-Microsoft FUD. And I ran a couple Google searches and I still saw little more than FUD from Microsoft sponsored research or security companies grouping vulnerabilities from all Gecko based browsers as "Mozilla" (which as we all know the average person will read as meaning "Firefox").

You can't simply count the number of security vulnerabilities reported in each browser. You need to consider the severity of the vulnerability, whether it was exploited by black hats, how long the vulnerability was known by black hats before it was patched, and whether the browser vendor is admitting to vulnerabilities that were no publicly known when they were fixed. The problem with IE is that they take the longest to fix vulnerabilities, and they are the browser most often targeted by black hats.

Really, fuck it. I've had it with corporate-sponsored dick-fighting contest about which browser is the fastest. I really, really couldn't care any less. Features, openness, security, standards compliance, yeah. But If I want a fast app, I'll go native, thank you. Maybe I'm too old, but I've always thought HTML sucked as a programming paradigm. As an information distribution mechanism, sure. But for interactivity? Please. It's about time somebody called bullshit on this. Hell, a goddamn Visual Basic app from fifteen years ago kicked the butt of most modern web sites in usability, performance and ease of maintenance. The only thing that makes the web so attractive is the barrier to entry : free, nothing to install, immediate access to the average brains of millions. Just like TV. No thanks for dumbing it down to this. And now you wanna make it faster? Piss off. Go write real code that does something, not just another abstraction layer.

"The only thing that makes the web so attractive is the barrier to entry : free, nothing to install, immediate access to the average brains of millions."

Ah. You forgot one other very important thing that make the web so attractive as a platform: Control. "They" have all the control over the app/service. They can changes terms of service, price, availability, etc. at any time they want and you have NO RECOURSE.

Instant updates to all your users at exactly the same time. No more worrying about if your users are using old, insecure, incompatible versions.

For times when users need to be connected to eachother, having everybody go through a standard HTTP server is the easiest way to getting rid of networking problems, not having to worry about firewalls, and not having to expose your users computers to the web.

Actually, no they don't. A few houses worth of friends and mine all interconnect without the use of anyone's services. Now, if I want to read The Tokyo Daily, I have to use something that connects to it. Can't afford the 12,000 mile of cabling m'self. They have every right to charge me for the use of all the shit they had to do to get my browser linked up with Tokyo.

The only thing that makes the web so attractive is the barrier to entry : free, nothing to install, immediate access to the average brains of millions. Just like TV. No thanks for dumbing it down to this. And now you wanna make it faster? Piss off. Go write real code that does something, not just another abstraction layer.

Your comment doesn't really apply. Microsoft is the only company with enough balls to ignore certain aspects of Acid 3 that aren't official specifications of HTML/CSS/JS.

Mozilla also ignores SVG fonts, as they should (enter WOFF), but you are right in that they are not a company. They are both right, and both deserve kudos for standing up to the hysteria of artificial 100 score on Acid3.

Its odd how both the summary above and the linked article sort of over look the fact that Chrome just blew the doors off of every other browser and the compared the production version to the latest and greatest of the others.

Chrome really deserves top billing, but the story is about the who is going to come in dead last.

Modern browsers are so fast that the difference is miniscule. If you're looking at using IE6 or using Chrome, then obviously Chrome needs to be praised. If you're comparing several browsers that are all fast enough that there's no strong difference between them in real world use, then mocking the loser is just more fun:D

Absolutely. I find it humorous how I will occasionally hear coworkers cursing:

1) The speed of their browsers. "Render, god damn it!" echos down the halls.2) The ability to quickly switch tasks/tabs within the browser (ie responsiveness vs. speed). "Fucking flash!"3) The stability of the browser. I don't really care so much if a single tab crashes; I'll just reload it. Someone with 40+ tabs in firefox, however, is stuck waiting a minute or so while whatever they were doing crawls back from the dead. (Users who don't have session management in their browser are even less fortunate.)

Meanwhile, I sit there contentedly working away, not distracted by such things, due to using Chrome and a lightweight window manager on Linux. I only start noticing a slow down when I'm being inefficient, anyway - IE, doing too much at once, getting distracted, and not getting anything done.

Of course, the slow users don't complain all that much, either. Seems they can't quite keep up with much of anything.:P

You mean like how they didn't test with Opera 10.70 beta? Or how they didn't even use the latest release version of 10.62?

That's not surprising - Opera hasn't caught on, and probably never will. You know the difference between Opera and technologies like Amiga and OS/2? Me, neither. "You hear that, Mr. Anderson? That is the sound of inevitability." And lemme tell ya, being an Opera user doesn't make you Neo. *shrug*

They forever screwed themselves because they used to charge people to use it. When there's a ton of competition, and it's free? Yeah.

So did Netscape, which eventually turned into Firefox. I don't think that has anything to do with it. Opera has great technology, and no understanding of what most users want in a (default) user interface. They also seem to have no clue that most users never change default settings, so it doesn't matter how configurable it is.

Look, apart from the fact that it was a little too heavy on my ram (FAR less than FF btw) Opera was ok, BUT i thought it was unfortunate that they filled it with superfluous crap. Like the massive toolbar on top which is now a tiny toolbar that FF4 is copying quite directly, the animated tab switch thingo (which you could disable mind), and that annoying dialer thing which every browser has now

Clearly you have not used Opera recently. I've personally been using it as my main browser for about 2 years, and the sheer degree of polish in the windows version is just totally unsurpassed by any browser, aside from it being bloody quick. Use it for a week, you won't go back.

(note: That is the windows version I am talking about. The linux version's UI is a bit off and it is a little slow to load)

You virtually never have that problem with adblock plus. Moreover, you don't have to maintain the same hostfile that many others would maintain too. By definition, host files are more limited, more manual, more prone to being out of date, and more error-prone. If I was going to use a system-wide solution, it'd be something like junkbuster, but that's way too slow, and too prone to breaking sites. Finally, the adblock plus lists are automatically updated, and maintained/monitored

The versions used for tests were quite debatable. For IE and FF they put up both the final version and the current beta, while for the other browsers they only show the results for the current release... mostly: the latest released Opera version is 10.60. A fair comparison should have included Chrome 7 and Opera 10.70 and replaced Opera 10.53 with 10.60.

I guess the actual selection of versions shows how the point of the article was more about bashing FF4 compared to IE9 (in which it also failed, given the very small difference between them) rather than doing a honest comparison of all of the browsers.

I have been thinking about using Chrome for some time, it seems faster and already has a respectable community around it. But I also would like to avoid google stuff and I'm already used to Firefox, not sure if it is worth the trouble.... Any opinions?

Try one of the Chrome forks, such as ChromePlus, SRWare Iron, Comodo Dragon, or a pure Chromium build. They're just like Chrome, but without the questionable Client-ID and RLZ modules that Google put in Chrome. I typically use ChromePlus since it has several features that I like builtin, but I've been trying the IE 9 beta and I like that as well. It's faster than Firefox in my opinion and I absolutely love the UI layout.

SRWare Iron was created for the sole purpose of earning the "creator" some money on ad revenue. To borrow from my previous post on the subject:

Everyone mentioning SRWare Iron should know about this little tidbit: The story of Iron [neugierig.org]. The article and the linked IRC log [neugierig.org] tell a very interesting story about a guy less concerned with having a good reason to fork and more concerned with making money off of adsense and publicity for creating a "privacy-respecting" Chrome which is basically a perpetually outdated Ch

I like ChromePlus the best. They added stuff like builtin Adblock, IE Tab, SuperDrag, Mouse Gestures, and a few other tidbits to the standard Chromium build. Iron was fine, but several of the "privacy infringing" features I actually wanted, such as some sane error pages and automatic updates. I also use the pure Chromium build on my Kubuntu system, and it works almost just like Chrome and it's open source. Chromium is missing the RLZ module (which sends an ID to Google whenever you do a search from Chrome),

Alternatively just go to the Options page in google's Chrome version, and uncheck "Use a suggestion service to help complete searches and URLs typed in the address bar". Crome stops the 'snooping' then.

I use Ubuntu 10.04. I have mostly switched to chrome (not completely; there are still sites that don't work properly with it). My problem with firefox was memory usage. I tend to have *lots* of tabs open and I often don't reboot for weeks. Firefox memory usage creeps up over time and my laptop slows. I keep reading that this is no longer supposed to happen, but it happens to me. Chrome with a comparable number of open tabs does not slow everything else down.

Browser open several days fully loaded with things? It takes all of 5 seconds to reload a browser. If its really that large of a burden what's the problem? I'm amazed at the behavior changes that I've adapted too now that browsers save open tabs on close/crash. Bookmarks have seen substantial decline, and I don't leave a browser open unless I'm in core development time or looking something up online. With a 5 second start time, there's really no bother for me. Maybe if you have dozens of media rich tabs co

I've been using Chrome for about two years now, I think (mostly Chromium, actually, but the performance improvement does not match the stability/memory use right now, so thinking of going back to Chrome). I gave it a try in version 4, and was underwhelmed. I switched outright when it was first released as available for Linux - in the early alpha stages of 5 - and haven't looked back once.

I was never a 'heavy extension user' in Firefox (at least not since 3.x), but I was almost always "cutting edge" (alpha,

As a guy who doesn't specifically care what to use besides IE, I can say that I always end up going back to FF from chrome. I try it for a few days, but I can't explain it but there's always something that I need in FF. The browser just seems slightly less likely to work with sites (not necessarily the browser's fault mind you), and I get crashes in it. Despite what I hear from others, I rarely get FF crashing on me. Now that there's plugin isolation, I imagine its less crash friendly. The browser is still

Well lets talk about my country for a minute. 200 years ago group A (the English) were over here taking property from group B (the Aboriginals). I don't think that was communism. And now that some members of group C (descended from group A) want to give some property back to group B, I don't that that is communist either.

Except it isn't Group C giving things back - it's a subset of group C, giving for everyone. They're taking from others in group C in order to be generous.

All said scenarios are theft. It just so happens that the current scenario happens to do so through the wealth redistribution methods outlined by Karl Marx, a man who wrote a manifesto which became the basis for modern "democratic socialism" and communism alike. The problem? Even people like Hitler and Mussolini were nice guys who came off favorably at fir

However, anyone who think it is okay to take property from group A and give it to group B is a communist. You can't take it from group A unless you believe property is yours to take.... held in common.

Okay, then, so you're giving up: medicare, social security, non-toll roads, all forms of insurance, public schools, libraries, the armed forces, etc? Guess what, all those things are possible ONLY by taking stuff from Group A and giving it to Group B. Throwing around words like socialism and communism is just

Firefox 4 beta 6 doesn't have the new JavaScript engine in it. Beta 7 will have it. But there's no particular need to wait for beta 7 as they could benchmark a nightly now. They also don't mention what kind of video card they've got in that laptop. IE9 and Firefox 4 can take better advantage of a good video card on Windows 7 than the other browsers tested and that may significantly influence a charting benchmark like this one.

I love how a difference of a few milliseconds (looks to be 5ms) means a browser "tanks" and its position, when compared to other browsers, can be described as "dead last." Oh no, we're not painting a bias picture here.

The way this benchmark measures "intra-frame time" is broken. In particular, it uses a setInterval with a 1ms delay. No browser actually respects that 1ms. Chrome clamps it to 5ms; others clamp it to 10ms, all to avoid the website thrashing the CPU pointlessly.

The upshot is that Chrome's interframe delay in the graph is about 5ms and Firefox 3.6's interframe delay is aboug 10ms. Which this particular benchmark can't tell apart from "no delay at all", given its methodology.

Firefox 4 beta, IE9 beta, Safari, and Opera seem to have delays greater than 10ms, so they're clearly doing some work they can't finish in 10ms.... or have slightly buggy timer implementations. Or both.

Of course in practice frame rates above 60fps or so are pointless since the screen doesn't redraw that often.;)

On the other hand, on Mac, on modern hardware, I get 4.5fps in Chrome 7 dev on a random trial document I just tried, with JS render tiems on the order of 7ms (with a 7ms standard deviation) and "intra-frame time" of 224ms with a 900ms standard deviation (yes, those numbers are nuts). Firefox 4 beta comes in at about 11s for the JS (with 3ms stddev) and 125ms for the "intra-frame time" (with a claimed stddev of 0, which looks really suspicious).

It'd be nice if there were non-obfuscated source for this benchmark so its number-crunching could be evaluated; that 0 stddev is... highly improbable.

Well they were comparing modern browsers and I don't know any one who considers IE8 in that category....

Just what do you consider modern? IE 8 was released in March of last year. It's actually the newest piece of software from Microsoft on my PC.

Personaly I think it was there just to show how much the IE team has really improved performance, to be homiest I am impressed.

Well I'm not. Why should I be impressed when a company the size of Microsoft takes 9 versions and 15 years to achieve acceptable performance? If they were on a par with Chrome I'd be impressed but it's not, it's slower than every other competitor except the Firefox 4.0 beta.

The story doesn't mention the GPU in use, but it does mention it's an i7 processor. So I assume it's using an i965-class GPU. These aren't exactly known for speed or stability on linux. I believe FF4 uses Cairo, which in turn uses XRender, and my experience with integrated Intel GPUs and XRender is that pure software ( ie X on FBDev ) is faster. I would have liked to have seen a system used which could actually accelerate the drawing operations.

And once again I see no mention of lag or latency behind everyday controls, one of the real factors which affect a user's perception of speed and responsiveness. The kind which gets them to say, "It feels faster, but I don't know how". I'm talking about switching between tabs, closing tabs, clicking the browser's back or forward button, and general UI navigation. You want hundredths of a second or less for these kind of actions.

I'm not sure how they get off calling this a "real world benchmark", as it seems to bear almost no resemblance to what people normally use web browsers for: "The benchmark works by simply dragging a part of the diagram around the page for five seconds." WTF?

It certainly doesn't seem to be any more useful than the other browser benchmark being touted these days, and arguably it's much less useful, because it measures a single very narrow aspect of browser operation, one which has little connection with typical browser usage.

Moreover, the slashdot summary seems to go to great lengths to emphasize how "badly" FF4 did on this (useless, remember) benchmark, and to pump up IE9: "The results were surprising. IE9 held its own pretty well (with a few caveats), and the latest Firefox 4 beta came in dead last" -- but if you actually look at the results that emphasis is misplaced: almost all the browsers were quite close to each other, with a few outliers, but in no cases was FF4 an outlier, and indeed was pretty much identical to IE9 (on this test).

The only clear result I can see is: When doing a certain very specific type of javascript rendering, most modern browsers have pretty much identical performance, though chrome's particularly fast, and IE8 particularly slow.

Of course, that isn't very interesting to anybody except LucidChart users, of course, nor very likely to generate any controversy...

Chrome is faster because it massively favors speed over customization and features. FF is slower because it favors customization, and assumes, correctly, that no one actually actually gives a flying fark if it needs slightly more than a 1/50th of a second to render a page that Chrome can do in 1/100th of a second. This isn't a problem, nor is it news. Now of course, you may do the occasional task where those milliseconds actually matter because your browser is processing something enormous, but then just in

I must say that I have pretty much totally switched to Chrome. FF 3 and 4 are really dragging my system down, and often fail to load sites I depend on (gmail passwords are now randomly rejected in FF, but work in any other browser).

Same here. I can't completely ditch FF, though, since it has all my webcomic RSS feeds set up just so, and Chrome doesn't do Live Bookmarks. And trying to recreate that list in another RSS reader would take days.

from Linux this month after using Linux since 1993, I think this applies to all of FOSS.

Somehwere around 2000-2006 FOSS was basically head-and-head with commercial software in practical usability and maintainability, with its own distinct advantages and a relatively small learning curve.

Then there was this veer into "if you ever want all the Windows users to switch..." thinking, and in an effort to eliminate the learning curve FOSS threw away pretty much all of its advantages as well. If FOSS is just Windows/Mac OS/IE by another name, why choose FOSS?

Particularly when Windows/Mac OS/IE win on the polish, compatibility, and accessibility fronts by virtue of their being cathedral-built software?

With Firefox slow and cumbersome, Thunderbird choking on Gmail IMAP continuously while Apple's Mail.app sails along happily, and KDE4/GNOME3 being emblematic of the many ways in which FOSS has lost its way, I just decided I'd had enough of the nonsense. I'm ready to be able to walk into Best Buy, purchase any device, and expect that it will work seamlessly with the current generation of computing devices, without options, without Bugzilla (and condescendingly dismissive developer retorts), and without lots of consulting Google to find out how the gconf infrastructure has changed in the last two years or how HAL has been replaced by DeviceKit or policies moved from/etc tree A to uneditable dynamic filesystem B (but just use this easy command line management tool to set options...)

It just plain saves me a boatload of time and headache to use something else, like OS X plus Google apps plus Chrome. The pending desktopization of FOSS has fizzled thanks to the politics of the bazaar.

As an example along similar lines, a user at my office reported a bug in Thunderbird to me. I tested and found it was definitely a Thunderbird bug. I made a test case file and submitted it to Bugzilla. A few days later my reported bug is deleted, to be merged with the same bug report from *2005*

Nobody who works on Thunderbird felt like working on the bug. It's not a sexy bug, probably doesn't hit too many people, and has work arounds...so it's stayed in the software for ~6 years.

And yeah I know, I should go in and fix it myself. Maybe one day I will. In the meanwhile I'll keep using Mail.app and I'll move more users over to new versions of Outlook that actually seem somewhat decent, and we'll go from there.

Let me see if I understand your complaint - a rare bug with workarounds is given extremely low priority and that's indicative of a general problem with FOSS software? What do you propose as a change to the FOSS model of development to improve the engineering?

Let me see if I understand your complaint - a rare bug with workarounds is given extremely low priority and that's indicative of a general problem with FOSS software? What do you propose as a change to the FOSS model of development to improve the engineering?

Well, first here we have a user. He sure as hell wouldn't have found the workaround. Then it gets reported to an administrator, who can't find any known bug (assuming he searched, but I would first) who then spends time building a test case. Then it goes to a bug triager who knows about five year old bugs and can identify this as a dupe and provide a workaround.

1. 99% of users would never find that workaround2. After that effort by three people, nothing will really be done to fix it

Even better are the projects that drive down bug count by attrition, WINE is rather notorious for this I've noticed. Every few WINE versions - who are on a biweekly schedule - they'll ask you to retest even though there's been no patches towards the bug, so when you grow tired of that shit the bug is "solved".

As for rarity, any bug that doesn't happen on a developer's machine for a developer's use case is by assumption rare unless a real shit storm of complaints prove otherwise. Don't get me wrong, it's pretty much central to OSS that people fix the stuff they wanted fixed, no bug is too obscure if you're willing to fix it yourself. But it also very much creates an A-list and a B-list of bugs to get fixed, and you go in B. It's actually slightly easier with commercially paid support who don't really have an agenda of their own, what the customers most want fixed is their priority.

Of course no, a single anecdote from single project doesn't prove anything. Sometimes I've had good experiences, but also many bad. Most annoying ar those where a bug report only leads to more and more work until it far outweighs my interest in fixing the bug. I'm guessing that's often the case for the OSS developer on the other side of the table too, which is why he is pushing 90% of the work right back at me. Often the choices then end up: a) keep using buggy software, b) spend way too much time getting it fixed or c) buy something that works.

I wish there was more of an organized bounty system, you'd pledge towards some bug fix or feature request, then developers could take it on. The pledges would be kept by a trust until the developer claims to be done (or withdraw), then the pledgers vote to confirm / claim incomplete / reject that it has been done. You'd probably need to have some sort of arbitration system to deal with formal disputes, who could take a processing fee off the pledge. Combine that with an eBay-like reputation system and I think it should work out well without too much hassle. I know it sounds a little like rent-a-coder and I don't mean it like that, more of an organized way of doing small custom work inside existing projects.

I once found a bug in the de-facto standard framework for Delphi and Borland C++ Builder internet communication.

It was a simple bug; the dates in SMTP headers used a locale-specific time seperator, ':' in most locales. In Italian locales (and undoubtedly many others) it's '.'. It should always be ':' since that's what the relevant RFC states.

I found the bug, wrote the patch, tested the patch, submitted the patch, explained the problem and one-and-a-half years and a couple of tries later... it still wasn't i

and seeing how many of these fruits of your labor actually end up in future releases. (Hint: none, even if the bug does things like solve massive NTFS corruption or critical on-screen corruption in the ATI 2D driver, both of which are real attempts of mine.)

They say "U Want? U Fix!"

Then you do and they say it doesn't:

Fit with project goalsAdhere to project style or standardsOffer regression data about other use casesSolve a big enough problem to justify effort to include

Okay, so it's entirely possible that you ran across a bug, but absent us actually looking at the particular bug and seeing how relevant it is to how many users, it's hard for us to judge how "fair" it was for the bug to have existed but not been fixed since 2005.

Or are you going to tell us that every bug found in Mail.app since 2005 has been fixed? (if Apple even has a public bug tracker and never redacts it...)

I can't tell you how many Mail.app bugs haven't been fixed. I can tell you that I get a lot more complaints from Thunderbird users than from Mail.app users.

Another bug which I don't even know how to submit to Bugzilla and so haven't. User is composing an HTML email. While typing, midsentence, and for no apparent reason, the font changes. I thought the user was doing something dumb

I made a test case file and submitted it to Bugzilla. A few days later my reported bug is deleted, to be merged with the same bug report from *2005*

Nobody who works on Thunderbird felt like working on the bug. It's not a sexy bug, probably doesn't hit too many people, and has work arounds...so it's stayed in the software for ~6 years.

And yeah I know, I should go in and fix it myself. Maybe one day I will. In the meanwhile I'll keep using Mail.app and I'll move more users over to new versions of Outlook that actually seem somewhat decent, and we'll go from there.

How have Apple and Microsoft handled your bug reports for Mail.app and Outlook? Did the handle them like Mozilla, where you enter the bug directly in their internal bug databases, monitor the progress, participate in discussions with the developers, and even contribute development yourself? Or do you have no idea what the status is, no influence on the outcome, and no ability to contribute at all? Were the bugs even submitted to development? Were you able to find a way to submit them to Apple and Microsoft at all -- could you communicate with anyone beyond level 1 end user support technicians?

Every application has bugs as old as its first release-- have you seen the age of some Windows security vulnerabilities, going back over a decade? -- and your particular concern won't necessarily get fixed. But if you compare the experience of handling end user bugs at Mozilla with the same thing at Apple or Microsoft, well, there really is no comparison.

While I haven't tried Microsoft.... since I can't figure out if some things are bugs or features, Apple has this: http://developer.apple.com/bugreporter/ [apple.com]It enters it into Apple's internal bug database.

And when I entered a bug against Safari 5.0.1, it was fixed in 5.0.2. Works for me.

Outlook.. pretty much all versions including the Expresses, all have issues.. some that have not been fixed.. Do a Google search for "Outlook will not save my password".. Don't know about "quality" but as far as least number of support calls, actually that would be Windows Mail, or Windows Live mail.. I absolutely hate Outlook calls.., because although it should be a simple matter of filling in the boxes, and checking the right check boxes, it rarely turns out that simple.

I think we started with Linux close to the same time frame.. My first install was Slackware with the root and boot floppies, if that tells you anything.. I went through the phases.. learning to compile from source, trying different distros with different package managers,. trying all the different window managers.. Etc.. But gradually, I developed a preference for all these things, and then found the distro that most matched it.. Where I have stuck.. I don't have to reinvent my system anymore.. been there

Firstly, the only thing including more samples in a test does is give you clearer results. It doesn't cost the tester that much time or money to simply run a web browser.

Furthermore, even if someone were to accept your claims and assertions, the matter is simply that the selection of browsers in the article covers all the actively developed rendering engines currently in use. No one would argue to include Seamonkey, Flock, or Galeon, even if they had a higher usage share than Opera, since Firefox already re

The thing with "real-life" benchmarks is that "based on Webkit" only gets you so far. Safari and Chrome use totally different JavaScript engines, for example. They use totally different drawing libraries. Heck, Chrome on Windows uses totally different drawing library than Chrome on Mac (which makes a difference in "real-life" benchmarks, since drawing is anywhere from 30% to 80% of the total benchmark time).

The less synthetic the benchmark the more silly details (exact browser, not just rendering engine,

Amusing. The post above you requested a filesystem that didn't fragment. You request copy-on-write, which massively increases fragmentation. With ZFS, every single write adds a new fragment. If you write a file, then modify a few bytes in the middle of it, CoW means that the file will now be in 3 fragments. This cripples performance on mechanical disks, which is why ZFS needs a lot of RAM for the ARC and recommends a big blob of flash for the L2ARC.

Well, the suggestion of trying the nightly builds isn't such a bad idea, because it does include the have the improved engine (Jeagermonkey). The currenty latest beta does not have the improved engine. So the any performance test you do with Firefox 4 Beta is going to be nothing like the release version.